His Last Duchess (4 page)

“I have been charmed by the experience,” Alfonso said. He glanced at Lucrezia, who dropped her gaze to the floor, then looked up at him through her lashes. Alfonso arched an eyebrow at her. She twitched down a smile.

A few moments later, accompanied by a bright-liveried manservant, Alfonso climbed the three flights of stairs which led to his allotted suite. Assuring the anxious servant several times that he was more than adequately provided for, and finally bidding him good night, he closed the door of the chamber, crossed the room in a few long-legged strides, pulled back the bed-hangings and sat down on the edge of the mattress.

The shutters were still open; a thin moon like a wide smile hung low and yellow in the night sky.

Alfonso lay back and closed his eyes. Apart from the increasingly sporadic chirrups from the crickets outside, all was silent. He ran both palms up and over his face, pressing the heels of his hands onto his eyes; flickering patterns of light and dark erupted beneath the pressure and his thoughts, surprisingly calm for most of the day, exploded into their usual clamouring confusion.

In
through
an
eye
and
out
through
an
ear…
like a child unable to resist picking at a scab, he returned to this horrible image yet again: the moment at which, a fortnight before, the resisting firmness of King Henri's eye had given way and the wooden shard had pushed inexorably through into the softness within. He imagined, with a nauseous squirm of the guts, the white-hot, panicked agony of it. The speed and the sharpness. Sharp.
You
would
have
to
respect
someone, wouldn't you, with a reputation for ferocity and an impressive skill with a knife
? She seemed, he thought, to have a modicum of a sense of humour, which was to be encouraged, though somewhat to his disquiet, this appeared to be allied with an unsettling and disrespectful tendency towards independence. That must be contained. How best to do it, though? The image he was beginning to build of his perfect duchess had to be maintained. How would this child compare with his whore? Would she—could she—be happy to accept from him what Francesca so energetically enjoyed? Would she be as accommodating as his pleasure-loving wanton with her ripe-peach breasts and that backside that would make Aphrodite weep? What was it Francesca had said?
Shall
I
be
redundant
now, after your marriage? Will you still need me?
Would he? Would he need Francesca once he had this girl in his bed? Once the resisting firmness of Lucrezia's maidenhood had given way and he had pushed inexorably through into the softness within? Inexorable. Exceptionally inexorable.
Exceptionally
productive, Este, exceptionally productive
. Would Lucrezia be so? An heir was imperative, after all. Imperative.

Alfonso's thoughts climbed over each other, frantic to reach the top of the pile; the images that accompanied them danced ever more frenetically, and snatches of music from the evening's meal wove their way in and around it all. Alfonso gripped his skull with his fingers. “Stop it!” he said aloud.

The wolfhound shifted in its sleep at the sound of its master's voice.

He made himself breathe slowly. He would walk through the maze again. Taking himself on the familiar journey through the ill-lit, tortuous passages in his mind, he would concentrate on counting his footsteps as he moved slowly through the darkness towards the inevitable final door. He would not go through, though. Could not. He would wait outside it, looking at it, leaning against it, knowing what lay on the other side, both entranced and repelled by his awareness of what he wanted, but needing the respite from the chaos.

***

“Will you stop this, Eleanora—I simply cannot understand why you are making such a fuss.” Cosimo de' Medici pulled the sheets up to his chest and jerked the bed-hangings shut. “The man is obviously cultured and intelligent—his opinions on the Ghiberti bronze panel—”

“Oh, Cosimo! I simply couldn't care a
fig
if he knows everything there is to know about every artist in Italy,” Eleanora snapped. She glared at her husband. “You've been refusing to listen to my worries ever since you first suggested this alliance, and now that it has gone too far to retract—”

“Why on earth would I want to retract?”

Eleanora felt a shout of frustrated anxiety fist itself in her throat. “Because I don't think this marriage is going to make her happy. That's why.” She flung back the bedcovers, flapped aside the hangings on her side of the bed, swung her legs out and stood up.

Her husband's normally cheerful face, now creased with incomprehension, peered through the hangings after her. “What in heaven's name do you mean?”

“She's too young.” A heavy stress on each of the three syllables.

Cosimo was angry now. He climbed out of bed. “Nonsense! Sixteen is a perfectly acceptable age to—”

“I don't
care
about acceptability! Quite apart from the fact that I've told you a dozen times or more that the average age for a bride—even in
Firenze—
is now seventeen or eighteen, I'm not talking about acceptability or averages! I'm talking about our daughter.”

“And so am I! What else is this about?”

“What else? I'll tell you what else it's about! It's about your blinkered determination to maintain the ‘continuance of the Medici superiority' at whatever cost…and your desperation to make your personal mark upon the annals of history and—”

“Oh, no, no, no! You go too far!”

A sudden pause.

“Do I?” Eleanora deliberately dropped her voice to just above a whisper. As she had intended, it wrongfooted her husband: he gulped back the shouted retort he had obviously been on the point of hurling at her, breathing heavily, as if he had been running for some time.

After another pause, Cosimo said, clearly making an effort to sound calm and concerned, “Very well. Tell me then,
cara
, what is troubling you?”

Feeling tears behind her eyes now, Eleanora struggled to keep her voice from trembling. “I don't know, Cosimo. I don't know. If I tell you it is a mother's instinct, you will tell me I am being foolish.”

“You are being foolish.”

“I know that I have no reason to feel like this. But…”

“Come here,” Cosimo said. He held out his arms to her, but she remained where she was, her gaze fixed upon his. He walked over to her and hugged her, pinning her unresponsive arms inside his embrace. He spoke into her hair, and she felt his words buzz against her scalp. “Of course you are anxious. She's your baby, your little girl, the little lark you have kept safe in a comfortable cage for sixteen years. And you are just about to open its door and tell her to fly free. Of course you feel anxious. You have been a good mother—but, Eleanora, he is a good man. He will take care of her. Trust him.”

Eleanora imagined her lark flying from one cage straight into another, and said nothing.

***

Lucrezia rolled over to the edge of her bed, tangling herself in her sheet, and turned onto her back across the width of the mattress. The muffled sound of raised voices she had heard from her parents' room had stopped. She stretched her arms above her head and leaned backwards so that she could see her room upside-down; her hands hung down and she touched the wooden floor. Her hair lay tangled around her fingers. She watched the sky through the inverted window for a moment, enjoying the sensation of pressure in her face, then rolled back onto her stomach. The sheet became even more tangled until, after a brief struggle, she kicked it to the end of the bed.

She pulled off her shift and walked to the window. A welcome breeze blew cool on her sweat-damp skin; she shook her hair off her face, leaned against the sill and stared up at the stars, shivering as the bricks pressed chill on her hot body and legs. The hair on her neck and arms lifted.

He had smiled at her again, just before they retired for the night. A slow smile as though he desired her. His earlier coldness—which had perturbed her—had gone. Perhaps she had imagined it. She felt almost sure that he had wanted to kiss her. And, she thought, with a tight little smile, she would quite like to have kissed him, too. She had never kissed anyone. A soft laugh puffed in her nose as she thought of the few occasions in the past that she and Giovanni had—as children do—made brief, giggling forays into each other's privacy: damp little moments of probing fingers and explosive snorts of laughter. She had no doubt that what awaited her in October would be as different from this as silk from sacking.

The handsome Signor d'Este would have much to teach her, she felt sure. The raising of his eyebrow as he had kissed her fingers just now had been knowing, playful—even teasing. Lucrezia felt a warm, prickling sensation in her belly. She sat back down on her bed and with searching fingers that suddenly seemed as detached from her as though they were no longer her own, she explored her skin. Her hands were lover's hands—
his
hands: the right traced up and over her left wrist, forearm, elbow, shoulder; the left moved back down the right arm. She put a hand over each breast and held them, and then, flat-palmed, stroked one hand down her belly, searching and curious. She lay back across the bed. Her breath caught in her throat as raw, inexplicable sensations ignited and burned, fierce and sweet inside her expectant body.

An owl called in the still night air and a fox barked twice. The castle was silent; Lucrezia wondered if she were now the only person awake in the entire building.

The candle guttered and its bobbing flame sent shivering shadows across the room. The red bed-hangings seemed to flutter and points of candlelight flickered in every one of the diamond panes of the two windows.

Lucrezia watched her new husband close the chamber door. He leaned with his back against it, facing her, his eyes fixed upon hers. Lucrezia's skin tingled, as though she had been running, though she had only climbed a flight of shallow steps—and that, slowly. She realised she was trembling. She tried to smile, but the smile died before it could reach her lips. Until a moment ago she had been sure that she felt elated and happy—as she knew she should today, her wedding day—but at the same time everything seemed insubstantial and unreal, as though she were playing an exciting, but clearly fictitious, part in a play. She felt detached from reality, an observer of her own emotions, aware of herself as though she were a separate third person hidden somewhere in the room, eavesdropping on what was about to unfold.

Alfonso said nothing. Leaning lazily against the bedroom door, weight on one leg, the other crooked up with the sole of his foot flat against the wood, he just stared at her with his head tilted to one side. As though, she thought, he were observing a painting or admiring a piece of sculpture. The corners of his mouth lifted as his eyes left hers and wandered from her face, down to her feet and back, slowly, slowly; appraising—approving, she imagined, for his smile broadened as he looked back into her eyes.

“You're beautiful,” he said at last.

Lucrezia tried to swallow. A burst of music from downstairs, and the sound of voices still celebrating, pushed its way through the open casement making her start.

“If you remember, I told you that my household was awaiting your arrival with great anticipation,” Alfonso said softly. “They are merely demonstrating their pleasure at your presence in the Castello. Come here.”

She knew this to be a command.

She walked a few steps and stopped in front of him. Alfonso looked at her mouth. Lucrezia realised it was slightly open: her lips were dry and she could feel her breath on them—cold in, warm out. Alfonso put his hands on her shoulders, then turned her so that she faced away from him. He ran the fingers of one hand up into her hair, and a shiver ran down her spine. She tipped her head back, pushing against his touch. Then, slowly and deliberately, much as she had imagined in her other life, back in her old chamber with Giulietta that summer, Alfonso began to unfasten her laces. In the event, he did not sing, but his breathing deepened and quickened as he worked.

First came the sleeves, which he slid from her arms like a caress. Then the more complicated laces of the bodice. He was taking his time, Lucrezia thought, apparently unaware of her trembling, seeming to enjoy flipping the long, thin cords through their stitched eyelet holes. She closed her eyes as Alfonso—still standing behind her—reached around her. With his head next to hers, his cheek against her ear so that he could see what he did, he eased her shift from her shoulders and let it drop. Her clothes fell from her, piece by piece, until everything—skirt, overskirt, bodice and shift—lay in jewel-bright folds around her feet, and she was naked in the mass of material, like Venus in her floating shell.

She stood quite still, watching the points of light dance in the windows, aware of Alfonso's warm bulk behind her, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

She felt his hands on her shoulders again; he turned her back to face him. Exquisitely and entirely exposed now, she held his gaze, wide-eyed, fearing that if she should so much as blink, he would look away from her eyes, and—would look at her body. At the thought, her nipples contracted and a hot thread from her throat hooked itself deep in her belly, where it jerked like a fish on a line.

But without taking his eyes from hers, Alfonso reached behind him and blindly picked from a small table a carved rosewood box. He held it in one hand, unlocked it and opened it with the other. Lucrezia drew in a sharp breath, and the hot thread tugged again as Alfonso pulled from the box a long, long rope of dark red, glittering stones. He stepped forward and began to wind it around and around Lucrezia's throat, sliding it each time underneath the mass of her hair. Each time he slid his hand across her neck, his face drew near to hers and the stuff of his doublet brushed against her breasts but, still, he did not speak.

Once fastened, the rope hung heavily around the base of Lucrezia's throat. Alfonso stood back and gazed at her, apparently entranced. The stones were cold and heavy against her skin, and she shivered.

Seeing this, Alfonso picked her off her feet and into his arms. Startled, she smothered a gasp. He walked swiftly across the room, pausing to blow out the candles as he passed them. As the flames went out, Lucrezia saw the wood-panelled walls and the gilt-framed pictures all but disappear; only the thinnest lines gleamed along the pictures' edges as the moonlight caught them. In the candlelight just now, the colours of the room had glowed as warm as late-evening embers, but now the moonlight turned this, in an instant, to silver.

The bedcovers had been folded back in readiness. Alfonso placed Lucrezia carefully on the linen sheet and, without comment, stepped back into the shadows. She pulled the covers over her, watching him in the dark, feeling the linen chill against her skin.

A moment later, Alfonso sat down on the edge of the bed, pushed back the blankets so that Lucrezia was once more quite uncovered, and then, slowly and deliberately, began to explore her body with his hands and his mouth. At the first touch she stiffened, her whole body prickling with shamed embarrassment, and with what in her confusion she hoped might be desire. She wondered what she should do. The silence seemed to be growing more and more robustly elastic between them, increasingly hard to break. The only sounds in the room were those of her new husband's breathing and the paper-smooth whisper of his hands on her skin.

She reached towards him, wanting to touch him, but he grasped her wrists and pressed them back onto the bed without comment, returning straight away to his own searching, insistent caresses. She tried again, twice, with the same result. Alfonso did not speak or look at her face and, to Lucrezia's bewilderment, seemed determined that she should take no active part at all in what was transpiring.

She began to feel increasingly unconnected with her body. Alfonso's touch excited her, but it was like trying to hold an image from a dream: as fast as she acknowledged the sensation she was feeling, so it retreated from her, disappeared into nothingness, leaving her bemused, confused and hungry.

It was not long, though, before Alfonso's hands became more insistent; her heartbeat began to quicken, and anxiety pushed thick fingers up into her throat, as she realised that the loss of her maidenhood must be fast approaching. She had been longing for this moment for months, but now, as she faced its immediate arrival, a suffocating feeling of panic began to tighten around her chest.

Even as she thought this, Alfonso lifted his mouth from her breast and, eyes black in the almost-dark, ran the tip of his tongue over wet lips. He did not smile, and Lucrezia shivered.

Alfonso shifted himself up her body and pushed one knee in between her thighs. At first she tried to hold her legs together, resisting him, her face cold and hollow at this unprecedented sense of exposure, but Alfonso edged his leg more firmly into place, crooking her knees upwards with his hands. Lucrezia closed her eyes and held her breath, expecting the stabbing soreness she had once been warned might come. Alfonso pressed down against her hips, but although she could feel a blunt nuzzling, as though of some hot-nosed animal, she was surprised that, in the event, it seemed quite soft and made little impression.

Alfonso swore quietly and pushed his hand down between Lucrezia's body and his own. His arm jerked awkwardly against her stomach, and then he tried again. She felt the hot nudging once more, then Alfonso's hands pulling and probing—she was startled as his fingers slid inside her, and let out a sharp mew of surprise. She was unsure what he was doing and did not dare to ask him, for her husband now seemed quite oblivious of her, other than as an obstruction to his achieving fulfilment.

He tried a third time, muttering angrily to himself and, as he failed yet again, Lucrezia's eyes filled with tears that ran, scalding, down the sides of her face and into her ears. After all the months of expectation, it seemed now that her new husband did not truly want her after all. He had seemed to at first—her body had appeared to please him—and she had thought him so assured, so grown-up, so experienced as he had begun to make love to her. It had to be her own failing, something she was or had done, that had debilitated him like this.

Despair draped itself around her like a wet sheet.

Alfonso rolled away from her to lie on his back on the far side of the mattress. Lucrezia sat up, dragging the covers up and over herself. With the untidy linen clutched in white-knuckled fists, she could just make out his profile, staring up at the ceiling. The whites of his eyes caught the light from the window. A sob swelled in Lucrezia's chest and she tugged the sheet nearer to her chin. Say something to me—please! she willed Alfonso. Tell me you are not angry with me. Hold me!

And then, after a few long seconds he turned, but he did not hold her, and still he said nothing. He reached forward and unfastened the rope of red stones, unwinding them slowly from Lucrezia's throat. Then, with the jumble of crimson clasped in one fist, he sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood.

Stiff with misery, Lucrezia watched him. It was now so dark in the room that she could not properly see what he was doing, but she heard the click of a tiny lock and the muted rattle of what sounded like glass. A rustle of material followed.

With a pinprick of shock, she realised he was dressing. “Are—are you leaving?” she said.

The words sounded horribly loud, whispered into the silence. There was no reply. Lucrezia watched her new husband cross the dark chamber. The lower edge of the door caught on the floor as it opened, then again as it closed. There was a scraping of claws as the waiting wolfhound scrabbled up to standing in the corridor outside the bedchamber, and then Alfonso was gone.

Left in the dark, Lucrezia sat up and hugged her knees, feeling those first tears itch in the creases of her ears as they began to dry. Her eyes stung. She blinked and bit her lip, feeling it tremble under her teeth, and then she began to weep again, unrestrainedly, overwhelmed with a bitter sense of failure.

She became aware of feeling cold, as she wept, and, rubbing her eyes, she climbed out of the bed. She knelt on the floor in the dark and ran her hands over the boards, searching for her chemise. Finding it, she pulled it on, then scrambled back under her bedcovers, curling up tightly with the blankets tucked close around her.

Her thoughts raced. She had, she realised miserably, pictured many versions of her first encounter with her new husband. In the teeming, childish images that had filled her mind as she had contemplated her first night in her marriage bed, she had seen the then unknown Alfonso as being perhaps gentle and tender, maybe forceful—even brutal—perhaps wild, and funny and unpredictable. Her imaginings had been vivid and entertaining, and she had thought she had touched upon every possibility.

But there was one thing she realised she had not envisaged: in none of her dreams had he ever been absent.

***

Lucrezia awoke after a short, unsatisfying sleep, just after dawn, with eyes so dry and puffed from crying that they would not easily open, but, unable to sleep further, she rolled onto her back and gazed through stiffened eyelids up at the canopy of the bed.

She felt quite numb. For months her focus had been almost entirely upon this first night. She had spared almost no thought for the weeks, months, years before her, so entirely had her mind been trained upon this exciting realisation of her newly emerging womanhood. There came to her now the prospect of a whole life unfolding ahead of her in the company of a husband who seemed unable to love her—an image quite terrifying to her in the potential of its bleak loneliness.

Tears leaked again from her still-swollen eyes. She wanted to go home, for everything to be as it had been. She wanted her mother. She wanted Giovanni, and the uncomplicated warmth of their undemanding friendship. She wanted to be a child again, having so manifestly failed in her first attempt at becoming a woman.

And then a noise startled her; she stifled a sob.

The door to the bedchamber opened.

Alfonso was carrying a candle, one hand cupped around the flame, which glowed crimson through his fingers. He was wearing a long robe and an intense expression Lucrezia could not determine. She watched him, unblinking, as he placed the candle down on the table. He took off the robe, and draped it over the end of the bed.

Lucrezia's eyes widened. It had been dark before, and she had been unable to see what the candlelight now revealed. As she saw the indisputable proof of Alfonso's new readiness to attempt the consummation of their marriage, an alarming image of herself as a pig impaled on a spit pushed its way into her mind. She put her hand over her mouth. The child she had been wanted to laugh. The woman she hoped to become felt a wash of relief that she appeared to be—at least a little—desirable.

***

Alfonso saw Lucrezia cover her mouth with her fingers as she flicked a covert glance at his prick. Her eyes were coin-round; her hair had fuzzed and tangled around the white, freckled triangle of her face. She had put her shift back on, he saw—the linen was sleep-rucked, and one small shoulder protruded from the gaping neckline. The bedclothes she held gathered up in both hands at chest height. She looked wary and frightened and terribly young, and he realised that he wanted her very much—his groin ached with the wanting—but as much as he intended to try again, so a pinching feeling of unprecedented anxiety held him back.